Angle ran, but couldn’t hide

Harry Reid, the former boxer, has long been fond of fight game metaphors. Last Tuesday, Nevada voters threatened to send Reid through the ropes and into retirement. In the process, GOP challenger Sharron Angle  nearly made a liar out of Joe Louis.  

It was Louis who famously said before his fight against the fleet-footed Billy Conn, “He can run, but he can’t hide.”�  Joe Louis never met Angle. That’s precisely what the Republican Tea Party revolutionary tried to do despite the best efforts of Reid’s campaign. Angle ran and hid from reporters almost from the moment she won the June Republican primary. Down the stretch, she ducked and dodged and even decoyed the press – and got away with it. The fact her strategy wasn’t successful says more about Reid’s indefatigable turnout machine than the political acuity of Angle’s campaign.   

Angle would have been Nevada’s first woman U.S. senator, a truly historical occurrence, but you wouldn’t honestly be able to say you knew her well because she didn’t let you.   

Call it strategy if you wish. Angle’s campaign relied heavily on a carpet-bombing television advertising campaign that was long on vitriol and outrage and short on specifics. That’s not unique. But, admit it, beyond holding a tighter fist on the fiscal purse strings, you haven’t heard a single fresh idea from Angle.   

Surely that was the plan: Rely on the image of the Tea Party conservative with the Constitution in one hand and a Bible in the other – and let the national GOP image-makers take it from there.    

In recent weeks, dozens of reluctant Angle supporters told me, “Hey, at least she’s not Harry Reid.” And Senate Majority Leader Reid was part of the three-headed Democratic monster that includes President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And Reid had to go, they said.    

Angle blew off newspaper editorial boards, and was carefully guided to ice cream social interviews with the Christian Broadcast Network, Fox News, and a long list of right-wing radio hosts – most of whom didn’t know Sharon Angle from Dolly Madison. They only knew she was running against Reid. Angle let spokesman Jerry Stacy respond to some reporters’ questions, but only the inquiries the campaign felt like addressing. She didn’t give interviews; she sent Internet postcards from the campaign trail.    

Even with that kind of sheltering, Angle managed to speak candidly enough to confuse us on whether she wants to eliminate or phase out Social Security, privatize the Veterans Administration, and close the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Education. And you still don’t know whether she was just joshing about appreciating how the public might resort to “Second Amendment remedies” if her side didn’t win at the ballot box and “take the country back.”�  Call it the grumbling from  a disgruntled Fourth Estater, but these used to be what people called issues. The public has a right to know what candidates really think and believe, and as far as I can tell Angle sincerely believes there’s no tradition of separation of Church and State.    

She didn’t owe me detailed answers about the issues and her personal beliefs and philosophy. She owed you those answers.    

And you didn’t get them. Maybe you didn’t care.   

Perhaps you were so tired of Reid and so hungry for change that any change would do.   

Here’s what Angle told her dear friend, radio host Heidi Harris, after the election and following an incident in which television reporter Nathan Baca intercepted her at McCarran Airport in an attempt to get her to answer a few basic questions. She called Baca unprofessional, never admitting that it was unprofessional for a candidate for public office to not make herself available to the public through the media.   

"Truly we should have had a better place to have a press conference than at the bottom of the escalator," Angle said.   

Then she added, "We need to bring back the professionalism into reporting, and I think that when we have an opportunity to teach a lesson we should.”�  And: "It isn't that we don't want to talk to them. It is that we would like to have objective questioning and true professional reporting. That is really all we are asking from them."   

Sure. That’s why she failed to grant interviews to the Review-Journal despite the fact it gave Angle her biggest endorsement of the campaign.   

Reid, meanwhile, made numerous public appearances and made himself available to the press often.   

On Tuesday morning at his campaign headquarters, he was surrounded by more than 50 reporters and photographers. The press fired questions. Like most politicians, he jabbed at some questions and deflected others.   

But he didn’t run and hide.    

How quaint.    

Angle, meanwhile, remained mostly out of sight. A flash of a public appearance here, a little B roll there.    

This was the one area every corner of the Nevada news media ought to have agreed on: Angle should have been vilified for playing duck and cover. Instead, with few exceptions, she ran silent without difficulty.   

The vote proved she could run, but she couldn’t hide.    

In the wake of the election, several of Nevada’s political pundits are opining that Angle has the political momentum to mount a serious challenge for embattled GOP Sen. John Ensign’s seat. I’m not convinced.    

Her lack of availability to the press is a troubling sign.    

As an old boxer might say, it’s hard to fight when you’re running away.